It has been a properly insane three weeks since the last dev diary. Somehow I have actually got a bit of work done on Iron Village (more on that in a bit), but I felt like sharing a least a little of what’s happened:
- A pretty great family vacation to Madrid.
- Horribly bad pollen allergies that made me legit need to take sick days from the day job and this job.
- GodotCon & PAX East
The first two are fairly self-explanatory, I hope. On Tuesday and Wednesday I went to GodotCon Boston, where the regular GodotCon expanded to hold an additional event over on this side of the Atlantic. There was a small showcase of games being worked on with Godot (the open source game engine Iron Village uses), as well as a bunch of talks around Godot and game dev in general. I didn’t get to stay for quite as long as I wanted, but it was great to meet so many Godot devs, and the talks that I did attend were really interesting – it’s definitely going to have an impact on how the next game gets built.
I was also at PAX East on Thursday! There are prints of the Iron Village capsule art available for sale at the Boston Indie Game Dev booth if you feel like supporting them! There’s so many good games throughout the whole expo floor though, if you’re also at PAX East it’s really worth checking them out.
Iron Village 1.1 Progress
Work on version 1.1 is in the finishing stretches now. I’ll be making a more cohesive listing of features, but here’s the rough version of what has been done so far:
- The Traditional Chinese language option has been split into Taiwan and Hong Kong versions.
- Korean and Russian have been added as language choices.
- Added the Royal Train that brings in Monarch Faearn for the City Establishment Ceremony
- Added Autopurchase functionality
- Added the ability to pause (and resume) production in resource producing buildings
- Added zoom buttons (although right now zooming out in a large window will allow you to see the grey void off the edge of the map).
- Added Screenshot Mode, which hides the UI for the purpose of taking screenshots. (The mode does not handle actual screenshot taking though, that’s on you.)
- Added functionality to the Royal Palace so that the player can stock up everything they need for the ceremony.
- Added 1×2 farm fields and 2×1 orchards, as well as 1×2 large houses.
- Added new stone house variants.
- Allowed for resource producing buildings to discard some output if it’s able to store other output. This is mainly for the deep mine, so you can still get gems even if stone storage is full.
- If you use a different window resolution, the game should now remember it.
There’s a bit more work planned, as well as a good amount of testing, but it really is the finishing stretches!
Iron Village on Android
So remember when I said the Android version was coming out in April? That obviously didn’t happen, but I should get it out with 1.1. The main thing that has to be done is handling text boxes (they can get covered up by the keyboard, which isn’t ideal), and there is some UI that might need to be bigger. Apart from that, the main thing is getting the Google Play Games SDK in, and then it’ll be at full feature parity.
There is the open question of price. Obviously most mobile games are free, with somewhat manipulative ways of getting money later through in app purchases. We’re going with the old school route of a paid product (with a free demo). A lot of the time when a Steam game gets an Android port, the Android version is sold for less. It’s a little odd since it’s theoretically the same game, but that seems to be the price mobile game buyers are willing to pay. However, there’s a couple of complications there: Google Play Games for PC, and Itch.io.
First, Google Play Games for PC. There’s a new feature in Beta that most games were opted into by default where you can play Android games on a PC. I still need to test how Iron Village works in that situation – it’s a bit odd since there’s a literal PC version, but whatever, I don’t have any reason to stop it. If it works well though, I can’t justify giving it the Android version a lower price tag – it would also mean selling the PC version for cheaper on one store than another. (That won’t stop be from making a sale for launch though.)
Second, Itch. While I haven’t exactly had a ton of sales there (6, to be exact), I’m still planning on supporting it. A purchase on Itch gets you a copy for all platforms, which will include the Android version too. I don’t really want to be selling the Android version for a higher price on Itch vs. Google Play, so I think I’m stuck with the full $7.99 on Android. That probably isn’t going to go down too well. 🙃 Still, PCs (of all operating systems) are the primary target for Iron Village, so I guess that’s just how it’s going to go.
Anyway, thanks for reading!
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